[HN Gopher] Banned Books: Analysis of Censorship on Amazon.com (...
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Banned Books: Analysis of Censorship on Amazon.com (2024)
Author : gnabgib
Score : 58 points
Date : 2025-03-27 19:37 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (citizenlab.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (citizenlab.ca)
| trollied wrote:
| They are complying so they can do business in the respective
| countries. Not really news.
| cess11 wrote:
| Why do you think the authors are aiming to produce "news"?
| freedomben wrote:
| Fair point, though we did view it from a site called "Hacker
| News" so I don't think it's unreasonable to expect these are
| "news" stories. I think you're both right
| ownlife wrote:
| Are most submissions here news stories?
| shermantanktop wrote:
| They don't need to use inaccurate keyword matching ("rainbow
| mentos") or opaque messaging in order to comply. The problem
| existing doesn't mean the solution is good.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| How else would you comply with a policy that uses inaccurate
| keyword matching to ban media?
|
| It's not like middle eastern countries only have a list of
| books that are banned. They have that for sure, but they also
| have a blanket ban on LGBT stuff as well as other
| "obscenities", "things that don't fit in their culture",
| "political books", "dangerous ideologies", etc. Most of that
| is left up to the discretion of the customs inspector your
| package happens to land on. I don't know if Amazon has some
| formal agreement with those countries (and it won't surprise
| me if they do). But It also might be the headache of dealing
| with items confiscated at customs. I agree on the opaque
| messaging. But I suspect it's less headache to say "Sorry
| item out of stock" than to say "This item doesn't ship to
| Saudi Arabia" then have to go on a fight with the customer
| who is gonna argue "no it's not banned"
| flotzam wrote:
| They could at least inform customers about the censorship and
| not sweep it under the rug:
|
| > among all of the restricted products identified by this
| study, none presented a message to the user explaining that the
| items were unavailable due to regulatory reasons. Instead, each
| item was communicated as either being "currently unavailable",
| "temporarily out of stock", or that "this item cannot be
| shipped to your selected delivery location".
| tedunangst wrote:
| What's unclear about "this item cannot be shipped to your
| selected delivery location"?
| cess11 wrote:
| It doesn't tell whether it's due to censorship or some
| other reason.
| verisimi wrote:
| Yes, UAE, China and Yemen ban books... But this article would
| have been far more interesting if it has shed some light on what
| books Amazon bans in the US and Europe. It's not like this
| doesn't happen.
| weinzierl wrote:
| They made their data public so you might get _some_ insight
| into your question from that.
|
| Unfortunately their data will not tell you which products in
| general are censored outside the middle east, but if I
| understood their methodology correctly you could tell how many
| of the products censored in the middle east _are also_ censored
| elsewhere.
| weinzierl wrote:
| _" We make our data available here."_
|
| Thank you very much! The whole repo is about 500 MiB and has data
| beyond the Amazon analysis.
| Mindless2112 wrote:
| The methodology is pretty limiting; it excludes books that Amazon
| has banned in all countries (e.g. [1]).
|
| [1]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/03/12/amazon-...
| rs186 wrote:
| > In misleading its customers and censoring books, Amazon is
| violating its public commitments to both LGBTIQ and more broadly
| human rights.
|
| Anyone who believes in such "commitments" in the first place is a
| fool.
|
| As a reminder, Amazon is a business, and its first priority is to
| make money. Everything else does not really matter.
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| The next iteration of The Anarchist Cookbook going to include a
| trans protagonist so it becomes unbannable
| sleiben wrote:
| I've tried to order Oriana Fallacis The Rage and the Pride 2
| years ago on Amazon (Germany). No chance to get it ... felt to me
| like censorship back then.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| By far the most interesting banned books are those about ideas.
| These never appear on banned books lists because they have been
| censored so successfully (usually > a hundred years ago) that
| journalists and researchers don't know about them and no english
| translations exist (indeed it is often those translations which
| are the banned versions). Most of them are in Russian or German,
| some Romanian or Hungarian.
| slt2021 wrote:
| curious, do you have a example or two of these? would love to
| read more about them
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